


cut to the roses

by maiamaryse



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-09-01 20:23:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16772266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maiamaryse/pseuds/maiamaryse
Summary: Jace just wants to mention it. Reach out to him.That had been scary, huh? Hadn’t it been a nightmare. It’d really been just the two of us for a second. Things got really dark and heavy quickly. We really felt like monsters. It was you and me and a little apocalypse, the thought of her gone.But he doesn’t. He can’t. He knows neither of them ever will.And then, inexplicably, they become great friends.





	cut to the roses

**Author's Note:**

> This follows on directly from 3a. 
> 
> warning: author thinks she's richard siken and doesn't care about speech marks

When Jace comes back to himself, it takes him a while to notice that something in Simon is changed, too. There is the finding of Clary, who is not-but-almost dead. The rushing back to Magnus’ loft, and then the collapsing onto the couch when he knows she’s alright. The very, very dark part, followed by the weeks of drifting around like a ghost, trying to be a person again, only really interacting with Alec. He mostly looks at his hands, eats the breakfast Alec shoves into his hands, tries to remember to breathe. It’s a while before he looks up at anyone else.

Clary is sharper than before, more reckless, aware of her own power and disregarding of the law. She is unreachable in her fury. Jace can hardly look at her. She won’t leave his side, for a while, but won’t touch him either. It is changed, between them. Can’t be the same, can’t go back to the innocence of how they’d been. Clary is a one man army, always entirely caught up in destroying something, saving the world, and doesn’t need anything or anyone. Jace is mostly trying not to implode. Clary says “I would die for you, Jace. But I don’t think I can be anyone’s girlfriend right now.” They figure it out. Belong to each other in a different way than before.

He endures what he couldn’t have conceived. What’s new? It goes on, as always. There are beasts to catch, as always. And politics and consequences and all of them getting away by the skin of their teeth again. And all of them constantly changing. Jace spends a long time looking at himself and his siblings and Clary, feeling awfully guilty and relieved and generally exhausted. And then his eyes fall on Simon and stay there.

Simon is sad and determined. He carries himself like he’s suddenly aware of a great responsibility. There isn’t a lot of direct addressing of the matter, of what happened to Simon whilst Jace was away, but he knows that there had been a mark on his head that made him hurt people, but it was gone now, somehow destroyed when it destroyed lillith, and that something bad had happened with his Mother, but nobody mentioned her. Simon is changed. Jace finds himself both drawn to and repulsed by him, connected by that terrible, desperate moment on the roof when they both thought Simon had killed Clary. Jace just wants to mention it. Reach out to him.

That had been scary, huh? Hadn’t it been a nightmare. It’d really been just the two of us for a second. Things got really dark and heavy quickly. We really felt like monsters. It was you and me and a little apocalypse, the thought of her gone.

But he doesn’t. He can’t. He knows neither of them ever will.

And then, inexplicably, they become great friends.

“God, you’re such a dick. You idiot,” Simon sighs, “just pass me the fucking shoe.”

“Oh your shoe, yeah, cool,” Jace nods, throwing him a water bottle instead. It’s very dumb. Simon is teetering on the edge of genuinely frustrated and helplessly amused, where Jace likes him best. He reckons one more and Simon will laugh.

“Jesus Christ, that’s literally just not funny or clever it’s so fucking annoying when you do this just give me the shoe-“ Jace reaches behind himself and then holds out Simons phone.

Simon lets out a noise of anguish, then an uncontainable kind of relentless laugh, like God it’s really not that funny but it’s you, and stomps to get the shoe himself. Jace laughs at Simon’s reaction. A warm, familiar feeling in the air. The joke is so old, the two of them getting on each other’s nerves, something so intimate and forgiving in the way they know just exactly how to do it. Jace could play that game forever. Simon sits beside him on his bed to tie his shoe lace. Simons studio apartment is very small and clean and bright, big windows. Jace had helped him move, he and Clary and Luke, from Jordan’s apartment to an attic above a post office. Maia had been noticeably absent. Simon hadn’t wanted to take much of anything, seemed to be punishing himself for something. Jace still didn’t know the whole story.

“I have to go get blood, are you coming?” Simon asks absently, in that easy way you can ask someone something like that when you already know they’re going to say yes.

“Sure,” Jace says, before starting an effort to remove Simon’s shoe laces from his hands and then from his shoes entirely, and Simon says god you’re so impossible and laughs and laughs.

They walk like little kids, elbows bumping together. Easy.

Simon gets into the bar first, and turns quick to shut the door in Jace’s face. Jace leans his head against the door and swears at him and Simon laughs, pulling it open unexpectedly, makes Jace trip a little before he rights himself. Simon laughs harder. It’s so stupid.  
Maia rolls her eyes at them from behind the bar, smiles a little smile, puts a brown paper bag on the table.

“Boys. No roughhousing in my establishment.”

Maia and Simon still look at each other with such blatant affection and admiration. Slightly wounded. Jace doesn’t know exactly why they broke up. They seem so attached, so fond. He supposes if might be similar to he and Clary. How you can love someone so purely and then it changes, because you both change, and the love doesn’t go away it’s just different. He remembers the four of them sat at that restaurant. How strange and far away. He wonders how that would look now, the four of them just sitting with all that desperate affection, so connected and so separate because of all the things that happened and happened and didn’t stop happening. He’s probably being dramatic. They’d probably just laugh.

Simon sidles up to the bar. “Your establishment? I didn’t realise you were the owner!”

“I didn’t realise you were a smartass!” She smiles.

“Yeah you did.” Jace says, fond.

Maia sighs. “Yeah, I did.”

She pours one shot of rabbits blood and two whisky neat’s.

And then, a brawl. A Clave sanctioned mission means Alec and Clary and Izzy and Jace vs the world. Jace can’t remember why Simon is there, too, except that he is always there. The demons are humanoid, and fast, and plenty. They screech and wail and have twisted up faces. It seems strangely simple, at this point, a demon outbreak. It’s black and white: here are the faceless bad guys and here’s a sword to banish them back to hell. No grand moral dilemmas or political undertones. But they are very ugly, and loud, and nightmarish. Ooze and screech and try to hurt his loved ones.

Jace is suddenly weary of the violence. He’d like to cut to the roses, to a close up of Simon’s face in soft focus. The part where the music swells, and they reach for each other. There is a horrible cracking sound as he grabs the nearest arm and twists. Wet blood and dry blood up his arms, on his face. Jace knows violence very, very well. It is comfortable for him in a way he knows is sad. He can’t stop having heavy thoughts like that, lately. Realising things about himself that he has to push away immediately to avoid spilling over. He’d like for that part to be over, to end scene and fade in on Simon’s soft, clean white t-shirt, the two of them laughing. But there are demons to tear apart.

The fight is over. The adrenaline fades. Clary is helping Alec up off the ground. The sun is starting to come up. Simon is looking at his own bloody hands, has that same look on his face from the night he climbed out of the wet dirt. Like he can’t quite believe himself. Is distantly angry. Always just a little bit angry. Jace swallows the feeling down, the compulsion to take Simon’s hands and wash them and be very gentle with him.

“Lewis. You’re still with us.” He says like he’s surprised. Simon rolls his eyes.

“I’m clearly very difficult to get rid of.”

Often, neither of them can sleep. They sit talking shit at Simon’s little kitchen table, Simons head leaning heavy against the wall.

Simon says “Sometimes I remember that I died and that I’m, like, something different now. That I’m going to live forever. It feels so big and weird. If makes me feel so sick.”

Simon says “I miss my Mom,” and tells him everything that happened.

Simon says a lot of things. He laughs. It isn’t funny. Jace aches for him. He’s maybe never cared so deeply about all the abstract feelings of another person.

Jace tells Simon things, too. Doesn’t really mean to, feels embarrassed about it later. He really shouldn’t show Simon all the ugly parts of him like that, but can’t seem to help himself. Both of them open books at the kitchen table, four in the morning. The sounds of the city harmless in their distance. Everything muffled, not quite real, all of it felt a little too deeply. Both of them looking at their hands.

It doesn’t really follow. There’s no logic, or inevitability, in the way they become so close, so quickly and so easily.

Jace dies and comes back and is possessed and used as a puppet to murder and do even worse things, and he’s tortured and nearly kills his brother. When he comes back he is a shell. Everything is very grey and impossible.

Simon dies and comes back and has his heart broken and is cursed to hurt and kill people without meaning to, and hurts his sister and makes his mother think he’s dead.

And then they stand on that rooftop together, thinking Clary is dead. The common thread: Clary. Who brought them both back from the dead, who loved them so fiercely she defied the most basic rule, that once you die you are gone. What a cruel joke, how pointless it all would have seemed, if she’d died then. Left them ghosts with no one to haunt. Jace doesn’t like to think about what would have happened if she had, can’t help but imagine he and Simon following her off the roof.

But she doesn’t die. They save her. They are all changed.

Jace drinks whisky. Clary gets caught up in distant, complicated rebellions and intricate rescue missions and burns, avenging angel. Simon drinks blood.

It should be difficult to sit with, their shared history. But it’s just not. There is just a strange ease in sitting at the bar, sometimes stupid banter, no bite. Sometimes quietly. Jace finds Simon’s company brining him a kind of ease that he finds nowhere else. It really shouldn’t, it should be heavy. But it isn’t. They laugh a lot, and see each other in the daytime, and save each other’s lives. It just is unaccountably light. Things can’t be all doom and gloom and demonic possession, not if they can laugh like that. Jace can’t be so bad if he can make Simon laugh like that.

After the brawl, they start the stumble back to the institute, ichor drying on their palms. Vendors are pulling up the shutters of storefronts and people in suits and overalls are starting their long commutes. No one really looks at them twice, and none of them can be bothered with a glamour.

“Do we even know why that breach happened?” Izzy asks, winding her whip around her wrist.

“It looks like they slipped up during some kind of summoning? Probably some warlock business or something. I’ll ask Magnus,” Alec says around a yawn. Clary grumbles something about helping to clean up the messes you cause. Jace can’t bring himself to be too curious.

He’s tired. And they eliminated the threat. And Simon is humming to himself, knocking into Jace’s side every few steps.

Then Simon stops, suddenly, such a strange expression on his face, and starts to shudder. “Simon?” Jace asks, thinks god hasn’t there been enough hurt and trauma and can’t we cut to the roses, please. The morning sunlight shining onto Simon in his soft white tshirt on the soft white bed, Jace covering Simon’s entire body with his own, whispering to him: You’re my sweetheart I love you I love you I’m full of it.

Simon collapses in the street. Not yet.

“What?” Clary asks, and Jace is kneeling, holding Simons head up to stop it bashing onto the concrete. His body is jerking horribly, contorting. Something to do with the demons? The sun? The mark that was gone? The Seelie Queen or Camille or Valentine or Jonathon or Lilith? Jace feels a horrible, cold, dizzying panic settle in his chest. Izzy and Clary join him on the sidewalk, gripping Simon’s spasming arms like it will help and Clary keeps saying what what the hell? A few Mundane’s stop and look and ask if anybody’s called an ambulance I can call an ambulance is he having a seizure?

Jace says Simon Simon Simon Simon, and he thinks a few of his fingers break where they’re guarding Simon’s head from the ground and then just as quickly as the shaking had started it stops.

“Magnus.” Alec says and calls him and then Jace is lifting Simon’s horribly still body from the ground.

Later- after Jace has laid Simon down on Magnus’ couch, and Magnus’ hands have touched his cheeks, glowing blue, murmuring distressingly about delayed possession and vampiric immune systems, and after Clary has said “I can fix this” and drawn a rune, entirely new and specific and strange on her hand, and pressed it to Simon’s cheek, and after they’ve watched black smoke rush out of his mouth and eyes and ears, Simon coughing and coughing and finally saying “That tasted… so fucking gross,” and the collective relieved laughter- after that, back in Simons little apartment, Jace pulls Simon into his arms and holds him fiercely.

“Don’t. Don’t do that.” Jace orders him, nonsensically, knowing Simon can’t guarantee his own safety, or control the terrible things the universe seems to want to do to him. “Don’t do that again.”

And Simon presses his face into Jace’s neck, holds him back just as tightly, says “Okay. Sorry. I won’t.”

And they both, impossibly, laugh.

And the world keeps turning. And they add it to the list of awful things that happened and then un-happened because Clary willed it, a small god.

They tell the whole story to Maia and Luke at the Hunters Moon the next night and they both say: jesus simon what? And find little ways to make contact- knuckles and palms pressed into his upper arms- like they’re checking he’s really there. Jace understands, can’t stop himself from having some small form of contact with him at all times. Can’t stop desperately needing him to be 1. Alright and 2. Right by him.

God, Jace has made himself so vulnerable, so dependable. He watches Simon grin and drum his hands against the bar as Maia tells him a story and thinks he’d probably be capable of terrible things, for the sake of Simon Lewis. But then he stops that line of thought. There have been enough terrible things.

It’s past two by the time they head home. Neither of them has to ask or confirm that Jace is heading back with Simon, that they’re going to change into comfortable clothes and fall asleep on Simon’s bed together. That they’ll forget to close the curtains and wake up to the sunlight shining in through the big windows. A miracle.

Jace can’t help himself, watching Simon blink awake, bathed in angelic light. Feels so comfortable, so right, so glad that Simon is safe, and that he is safe, that they’re allowed this.

“Can I kiss you?” He asks. Simon turns to face him, still waking up. Smiles.

“Okay.”

So, Jace kisses him. Laughs. Kisses him.

The world is very sharp. Maybe they will both change and things won’t be the same one day, their love will become old and distant and they will see each other only sometimes.

It doesn’t matter. Jace covers Simons whole body with his own, presses his face into the soft skin below his chin; my sweetheart my darling my love for you is exploding, I’ll be your companion, wash you treat you gently, laugh and laugh, my sweet sweet friend. It doesn’t matter what will happen after because it happens, and Jace can always reach out for him say:

Remember, we were in love, huh? Wasn’t it heaven. It’d really been just the two of us for a second. Things got really good and light, didn’t have to be so dramatic. We were just good for each other, made each other so happy, took care of each other. It was you and me and a little beginning.

And it’s good, it’s good, it’s so good.


End file.
